The Dead Don't Hurt

Mortensen’s second feature as writer-director offers a distinctive proposition about what a 21st-century Western could be. At best, he succeeds in tapping into the gentler, more lyrical side of the genre in the spirit of classic Hollywood directors.

In its unconventional narrative structure and its tender perspective on a brutal era, Mortensen’s film acts as a mirror of his own public persona: tightly drawn, deeply felt, refreshingly unconventional.

Mortensen’s script tussles between feminist revision and old-school male showdowns, imagining Vivienne as a Joan of Arc-inspired frontierswoman yet subject to the degradations of the era.

What really carried this movie through... it that it ends up spending most of its time on Vicky Krieps, and it becomes like a western romance.

Viggo Mortensen is the new Robert De Niro... And he takes his filmmaking very seriously.

Mortensen does not aggressively impose his vision on us, nor does he do so with the typical shoot-outs of the genre, which appear in a justified and even responsible manner. [Full review in Spanish]

It’s a pretty movie starring two endlessly magnetic actors but it also feels like a self-conscious attempt to make a feminist Western by clumsily inserting characters with present-day values.

The Dead Don't Hurt affirms the effectiveness of the [western] genre in the present, its impact on modern concepts such as justice or personal ethics, to once again sow that land of life and truth. [Full review in Spanish]

The Dead Don't Hurt is more about the suffering of women in the Wild West, something that is not typically shown in cinema. [Full review in Spanish]

...Mortensen stands out as a solid director who tells the story without haste and relies more on emotion than on dramatic effects, on deep dialogue...rather than those about revenge and the imposition of law and order at any cost.[ Full review in Spanish]